"Game in development purchase" Topic

Hi there chaps

Me and my boys (sounds silly, but what the heck! :-p) are currently designing a Napoleonic skirmish game, its in the early-ish days at the moment, but the design is coming on rather well.

I'm currently pondering if it is good idea, (or possibly the worst one since Suarez's chomping the other day)to put the early versions of the rules up for sale at a discounted price.

Say the full version would be £10.00 GBP, make the early version available for say between £2.00 GBP to £5.00 GBP as a download. Then, as the game continues to develop and improve release updated versions and if someone purchased an early version they would receive the updated version free of charge.

In the end the early purchase would receive a discount equal to their purchase off of the final version.

Good idea or bad idea? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Cheers

Garry

Bad idea. You want everyone's first impression to be your best effort.

Keeping with your example. The person who purchases your game early and provides input ends up paying 10 in the end to get a finished product?

Good point. In which case we would consider a further discount or even the final electronic version free.

In my opinion, there are a lot of free rules out there (some good, some not so, some awful) for gamers to want to pay for a Beta test set that may or may not be good. Offer your rough draft for free, then charge full price for the finished version.

I did exactly what you are suggesting with my Sword & Spear rules. I made a playtest version available for £3.00 GBP, and when the final version went on sale for £6.00 GBP (for the pdf), anyone who had already paid for the playtest version only had to pay the difference. Any playtesters who played games and provided feedback got the final version for no extra cost.
I think doing it this way worked well.
In the past when I asked for playtesters for rules (and the playtest rules are given to them at no charge) , I have found that lots of people offer to playest, but then hardly any of them provide feedback. Maybe other rules authors can confirm this, but the feeling I get is that when most people offer to playtest, they are really just looking to get hold of the rules for free. Especially if they know the rules are going to go on sale later.
I felt that by charging for the playtest rules, it meant that the buyer was showing a level of commitment towards the rules, and was then more likely to play and provide feedback.
Also, offering something for free tends to give the impression that it has no value. By charging, you would be saying that even the playtest rules have some value. In fact one of the comments I received was that my playtest rules were well worth the £3.00 GBP, as they were better written and more complete than many published rules.